Affect and the reparative turn: Repairing qualitative analysis?

Abstract

Contrary to social constructionism, affect theories are less concerned with privileging the epistemological problems of knowledge construction than with attending to the ontological. This raises questions about what should be constituted as data as well as how we view, read, and interpret it. This article introduces to qualitative psychology the currently overlooked work on affect and the reparative turn inspired by queer feminist theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. We outline close reading techniques and reflect on sources of data to contribute to a new approach that could be called reparative methods. We present an empirical example, exploring how the techniques outlined can be applied to data collated from an evaluation project of a psychoeducation intervention for mental health service users. Finally, we reflect on the potential of a reparative approach, suggesting it opens novel ways for engaging qualitative psychology with contemporary concerns related to feelings, senses, being, and belonging. Rather than rejecting established methodological approaches such as discourse analysis, we invite others to engage in their own creative adventures with the reparative as a means to extend our methodological tools for working between the epistemological and ontological toward social transformation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.